Socratic dialogue

Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment.And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.
As an undergraduate at Stanford I took a seminar that profoundly changed my life. It was called “The Ethical Analyst,” and it was conducted in the form of a Socratic dialogue by an extraordinarily gifted professor, Ronald A. Howard.[1] Our discussion focused on a single question of practical ethics:
Is it wrong to lie?
At first glance, this may seem a scant foundation for an entire college course. After all, most people already believe that lying is generally wrong—and they also know that some situations seem to warrant it.
What was so fascinating about this seminar, however, was how difficult it was to find examples of virtuous lies that could withstand Professor Howard’s scrutiny.

Deductive and inductive reasoning schemas essentially regulate inferences. They tell us what kinds of inferences are valid and what kinds are invalid. A very different kind of system of reasoning, also developed about twenty-six hundred years ago in Greece, and developed at the same time in India, is called dialectical reasoning. This form of reasoning doesn’t so much regulate reasoning as suggest ways to solve problems. Dialectical reasoning includes the Socratic dialogue, which is essentially a conversation or debate between two people trying to reach the truth by stimulating critical thinking, clarifying ideas, and discovering contradictions that may prompt the discussants to develop views that are more coherent and more likely to be correct or useful.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century versions of dialectical reasoning, owing primarily to the philosophers Hegel, Kant, and Fichte, center on the process of “thesis” followed by “antithesis” followed by “synthesis”—a proposition followed by a potential contradiction of that proposition, followed by a synthesis that resolves any contradiction.

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The principles also imply another important tenet of Eastern thought, which is the insistence on finding the “middle way” between extreme propositions. There is a strong presumption that contradictions often are merely apparent, and an inclination to believe that “A is right but not A is not wrong.” This stance is captured by the Zen Buddhist dictum that “the opposite of a great truth is also true.”
To many Westerners, these notions may seem reasonable and even familiar. The Socratic dialogue, often called dialectical, is similar in some ways. This is a conversation exchanging different viewpoints, with the goal of more closely approaching the truth. Jews borrowed that version of dialectical thinking from the Greeks, and Talmudic scholars developed it over the next two millennia and more. Western philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such as Hegel and Marx made contributions to the dialectical tradition.

He establishes an underground digital communications network, based on chipped Xboxes loaded with free software, organising flash mobs of teenage protest and culture-jamming the DHS surveillance systems in an attempt to hold a mirror to the rights abuses of the DHS for long enough to pierce the adults’ assurance that the new regime is in their best interests.
Marcus’s relationship with his father exists as a kind of Socratic dialogue on the ethical aspects of the surveillance society, woven through the book as Marcus becomes more and more embroiled with the Department of Homeland Security’s total surveillance of San Francisco’s citizens. Just like Cory’s father, Marcus’s dad was a radical in his youth. But by the time we get to the events of Little Brother, he’s earning his keep and saving up for Marcus’ college education by consulting to “third-wave dotcoms that are doing various things with archives” in Silicon Valley.

You’ve got a good future,” and so on. Most times you can keep them. Absent that personal connection, you’re just a name.
Making a personal connection has nothing to do with style. You don’t have to be charismatic or a salesperson. I don’t care what your personality is. But you need to show up with an open mind and a positive demeanor. Be informal, and have a sense of humor. A business review should take the form of a Socratic dialogue, not an interrogation. All you’ve got to prove is that you care for the people who are working for you. Whatever your respective personalities are, that’s the personal connection.
The personal connection is especially critical when a leader starts something new. The business world is full of failed initiatives. Good, important ideas get launched with much fanfare, but six months or a year later they’re dead in the water and are abandoned as unworkable.

One long, late Sunday of the Great Panic, Michelle Smith, the Fed’s chief spokeswoman, called her husband and asked him to pick up sandwiches from a Panera near their house in Virginia and deliver them to the Fed headquarters. Early in September, as the crises continued, the Fed made a deal with a nearby Subway to stock a refrigerator on the governors’ corridor with turkey and ham sandwiches — each with an individual expiration date. The emergency rations came in handy that night.
Finally, the Fed officials conducted a Socratic dialogue — via telephone — with Bair and her staff to speed up the decision.
“Has your staff told you what the [FDIC fund’s] expected loss is with Citi?” they asked.
“We think it is zero,” said Bair. In other words, the most likely scenario wouldn’t require the FDIC to absorb any losses. And Wells?
“We think it is positive,” she answered, meaning the FDIC would have to come up with money eventually.

All the Crotobaltislavonians had gone inside, and the professors, finding themselves in an empty lot with only the remains of a few dozen steers to keep them company, decided to re-deploy inside the Plex.
There things were noisier. People who never engage in violence are quick to talk about it, especially when the people they are arguing with are elderly Greek professors unlikely to be carrying tire chains or knives. Of course, the Greek professors, who tried to engage the picketers in Socratic dialogue as they broke the picket lines, were not subject to much more than occasional pushing. Among younger academics there were genuine fights. A monetarist from Connecticut finally came to blows with an Algerian Maoist with whom he’d been trading scathing articles ever since they had shared an office as grad students. This fight turned out to be of the tedious kind held by libidinous orthodontists’ sons at suburban video arcades.

So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.
Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing—interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.
The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction.

By ensuring that the points would translate into special privileges, he gave them value. By making one’s moderation powers expendable, he created the crucial property of scarcity. With only one or the other, the currency is valueless; combine the two, and you have a standard for pricing community participation that actually works.
The connection between pricing and feedback is itself more than a metaphor. As a character in Jane Jacobs’s recent Socratic dialogue, The Nature of Economies, observes: “Adam Smith, back in 1775, identified prices of goods and rates of wages as feedback information, although of course he didn’t call it that because the word feedback was not in the vocabulary at the time. But he understood the idea. . . . In his sober way, Smith was clearly excited about the marvelous form of order he’d discovered, as well he should have been.

If Atta’s concerns had genuinely been to use his professional training to effect social change, this would have been an inspiring model for him. Instead Atta left the country for Europe.
The Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, known by its initials as TUHH, is one of Germany’s newest universities, established only in 1982. It has a suburban campus close to the River Elbe. It sits in a complex of mainly new buildings that have at their heart an agora stepped into semi-circular tiers for Socratic dialogue, a reflection of the belief of the town planning department’s dean, Professor Dittmar Machule, in the virtues of traditional urban forms. Machule received a grant from the German Vibrant Cities Foundation to conduct a research programme to determine what makes a city centre lively. But it was more likely that it was Machule’s work in Aleppo, the 5,000-year-old Syrian city, funded by the German Government’s technical assistance programme for conservation and rehabilitation, that attracted Atta to Hamburg in 1992.

Home in his apartment in Brooklyn, Bobby went through what was becoming his routine: elimination of social engagements, long periods of solitary study, analysis of games, and a search for innovations in openings. He classified the lines he studied into stratifications of importance, always eliminating the not-quite-perfect continuation and seeking what he called the “true move,” that which could not be refuted. A Socratic dialogue raged within him: How unusual was the resulting position if he followed that particular line? Would his opponent feel at sea? Would he (Bobby) feel comfortable playing it? How would he ground himself if he had to continue to play that variation until the endgame?
Grandmaster Pal Benko, a former Hungarian freedom fighter who became a U.S. citizen and, like many other chess players, an investment broker, entered Bobby’s room at the Hotel Intercontinental in Curaçao shortly after Arthur Bisguier, Bobby’s second, had arrived.

Eric Cannon, for example, at only nineteen, was saving the world, and I at the age of only thirty-five, am again, as at age eight, in the process of destroying it...
Chapter Thirty-four
I had only one session with Eric Cannon to try to introduce him to dice therapy, because he and his father had reached some kind of agreement whereby Eric was to be released three days later. He was naturally keyed up about leaving and didn't listen carefully as I began a Socratic dialogue to get him into dice therapy. Unfortunately, the Socratic method entails a second person at least willing to grunt periodically and since Eric remained absolutely mute I gave up and told him in a twenty-minute lecture what a dicelife was all about. He became quite alert. When I'd finished he shook his head from side to side slowly.
`How do you stay loose, Doc?' he asked. `How do you keep yourself on that side of the desk?'

Upper-class parents have more egalitarian relations with their children and are more likely to use reasoning and guilt for discipline, whereas lower-class parents are more likely to use physical punishment, like whupping.51
Figure 3.1: Parental education and parenting objectives
Source: Faith Matters national survey, 2006.
These class differences show up in parents’ actual behavior, not just their avowed priorities. Simone can’t recall ever punishing Desmond (not even “no TV for a week”). Carl likens a parent sometimes to a soccer referee (“That’s when you pull that parental card and say, ‘This is it’ ”), but as his kids got older, he preferred Socratic dialogue (“Explain to me why you are doing that. Have you thought of this?”).
By contrast, Stephanie, whose parents “beat the hell” out of her, believes in very tough love (“You can’t be soft. You gotta be hard, really hard”). Despite the undoubted fact that she “love[s her] kids to death,” her first response to disobedience is a beating. Even Elijah—who was beaten unconscious by his father after the arson episode, who displays remarkable insight into the costs of abusive parenting, and who talks about the importance of “say[ing] good words” to children—doesn’t display any doubts about how to handle a wayward son.

I want to know, therefore, which approach to social justice helps provide the framework for understanding and the impetus for action on health inequities.
My guide has been Professor Michael Sandel, although he doesn’t know it.4 He teaches a philosophy class at Harvard which apparently is regularly oversubscribed. Having seen him in action at my own university, I can see why. He uses everyday problems and controversies, examined in lucid Socratic dialogues with his audience, to draw out principles of political philosophy. He does not provide me with an answer to social justice and health but he provides a framework for thinking about it.
Sandel distinguishes three approaches to social justice:
•maximising welfare,
•promoting freedom, and
•rewarding virtue.
It illuminates the cause of social justice and health to see how each of these might apply to avoidable health inequalities.

Yes, but so is the Book of Job, and I don’t choose to sing the thing aloud every morning before breakfast.
The Gurugita does have an impressive spiritual lineage; it’s an excerpt from a holy ancient scripture of Yoga called the Skanda Purana, most of which has been lost, and little of which has been translated out of Sanskrit. Like much of Yogic scripture, it’s written in the form of a conversation, an almost Socratic dialogue. The conversation is between the goddess Parvati and the almighty, all-encompassing god Shiva. Parvati and Shiva are the divine embodiment of creativity (the feminine) and consciousness (the masculine). She is the generative energy of the universe; he is its formless wisdom. Whatever Shiva imagines, Parvati brings to life. He dreams it; she materializes it. Their dance, their union (their Yoga), is both the cause of the universe and its manifestation.

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PG is the leading apostle, to not say messiah, of the startup gospel, and other than maybe Marc Andreeson, possesses the only prose style among techies that doesn’t trigger a literary gag reflex. His lucid essays dispense with any ego and pretense, and read like a how-to manual for the tech endeavor. Reflecting his background in philosophy and formal logic, his tightly argued disquisitions often read almost syllogistically, like a Socratic dialogue, as he dissects funding rounds, hiring, cash flow, and product development.
Having forgotten the URL to his essay library, I entered “ycombinator.com” into my browser. The minimalist website carried a picture of a geek in a weird orange-walled room, some links to press coverage, and one link that was tantalizingly titled “Apply to get funded. Deadline March 3, 2010.”
Isn’t that something?

“Questions are a really useful service for curing writer’s block,” as Charlie Cheever, the soft-spoken cofounder of Quora, tells me. “You might think you want to start a blog, but you wind up being afraid to write a blog post because there’s this sense of, who asked you?” Question answering provides a built-in, instant audience of at least one—the original asker. This is another legacy of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, in which Socrates asks questions of his debating partners (often faux-naive, concern-trolling ones, of course) and they pose questions of him in turn. Web authors long ago turned this into a literary form that has blossomed: the FAQ, a set of mock-Socratic questions authors pose to themselves as a way of organizing information.
It’s an addictive habit, apparently. Academic research into question-answering sites has found that answering begets answering: people who respond to questions are likely to stick around for months and answer even more.

Others have asserted that for Hegel, the dialectic was a
metaphysical device that allowed one to deduce the whole of hu­
man history f r o m a priori o r logical first principles, independently
of empirical data and knowledge of real historical events. This
view of the dialectic is untenable; a reading of Hegel's historical
works will reveal that historical accident and contingency play a
large role in t h e m . T h e Hegelian dialectic is similar to its Pla­
tonic predecessor, the Socratic dialogue, that is, a conversation
between two h u m a n beings on some important subject like the
nature of the good o r the meaning of justice. Such discussions a r e
resolved on the basis of the principle of contradiction: that is, the
less self-contradictory side wins, o r , if both a r e f o u n d in the course
of the conversation to be self-contradictory, then a third position
emerges free of the contradictions o f the initial two.

"With all due respect, Your Grace, I do not necessarily agree with your premise. New Atlantis has many fine artists."
"Oh, come now. Why do all of them come from outside the tribe, as you did? Really, Mr. Hollywood, would you have taken the Oath at all if your prominence as a theatrical producer had not made it advantageous for you to do so?"
"I think I will choose to interpret your question as part of a Socratic dialogue for my edification," Carl Hollywood said carefully, "and not as an allegation of insincerity on my part. As a matter of fact, just before I encountered you, I was enjoying my cigar, and looking about at London, and thinking about just how well it all suits me."
"It suits you well because you are of a certain age now. You are a successful and established artist. The ragged bohemian life holds no charm for you anymore.

Belief illuminates the way a blindfold does! Are you listening, Jasper? Sometimes you'll be walking in the city late at night, and a woman walking in front of you will spin her head around and then cross the street simply because some members of your gender rape women and molest children!"
Each class was equally bewildering, covering a diverse range of topics. He tried to encourage me to engage him in Socratic dialogues, but he wound up doing both parts himself. When there was a blackout during an electrical storm, Dad would light a candle and hold it under his chin to show me how the human face becomes a mask of evil with the right kind of lighting. He taught me that if I had to meet someone for an appointment, I must refuse to follow the "stupid human habit" of arbitrarily choosing a time based on fifteen-minute intervals.

The language of an oral culture had to be wrenched into new forms; thus a new vocabulary emerged. Poems were seen to have topics—the word previously meaning “place.” They possessed structure, by analogy with buildings. They were made of plot and diction. Aristotle could now see the works of the bards as “representations of life,” born of the natural impulse toward imitation that begins in childhood. But he had also to account for other writing with other purposes—the Socratic dialogues, for example, and medical or scientific treatises—and this general type of work, including, presumably, his own, “happens, up to the present day, to have no name.”♦ Under construction was a whole realm of abstraction, forcibly divorced from the concrete. Havelock described it as cultural warfare, a new consciousness and a new language at war with the old consciousness and the old language: “Their conflict produced essential and permanent contributions to the vocabulary of all abstract thought.

Their faces were sagging with concern. "Yeah," said Fanon, "who?"
"Well, hell," said Charlie, "I remember some uv'em ... Smiley, Rudy Brauer... they had this end named Goodykoontz, I remember him ..
"Unnh-hunnnh," said Fanon, "but what'd they be?"
"Wha'ya mean, what?" said Charlie.
Fanon said, "How many uv'em was African Americans?"
Roger sagged back in his chair and closed his eyes. He knew exactly where this little Socratic dialogue of Fareek's was heading. Why had he, Roger Too White, been so foolish as to tell Fareek that all the records set by Southeastern Conference greats of long ago didn't mean but so much, because all black athletes were shut out of the competition by racial segregation? Why had he told Fareek that at the very least all the records in the record books of that time should have asterisks with a footnote reading "Black athletes"—or, rather, "African-American athletes"—Fareek had already picked up the new nomenclature on his own—"African-American athletes denied access to Conference schools"?

Leibniz considered it for a few moments, then said: “Say! How is the youngest son of the Duke of Parma faring these days? Has he recovered from that nasty rash?”
“You have quite lost me, sir. I do not even know the name of the Duke of Parma, much less the medical condition of his youngest son.”
“That was already obvious,” said Leibniz, “for he has no sons—two daughters only.”
“I am beginning to feel like the Dim Interlocutor in a Socratic dialogue. What is your point?”
“If you asked the Duke of Parma about Leibniz, he might recognize the name vaguely, but he would know nothing of Natural Philosophy, and of course it is absurd to think he would entrust a daughter to me, or you, on a journey. Almost all the nobility are like the Duke of Parma. They don’t know, or care about, us, and we know little of them.”
“You are saying that I have fallen victim to observational bias?”